Posts for June 21, 2026 (page 2)

In the Mississippi of my childhood, the summer-thick heat rises, blurring the blacktop and bringing with it the scent of rotting persimmons that I gather into a cracked five-gallon bucket in our front yard. The cars speeding by bring the only breeze. My hair is a hot scarf and I want to go inside and ask for a glass of water. Instead I pinch a piece of fruit between my thumb and forefinger, a purple and orange marble, a tiny membranous egg, and watch the flesh split through its skin. The thing about persimmons is they’re fickle little things—one day toothache-sweet, the next they’re bitter as a mother forty years into a love-starved marriage. I place one on my tongue as my father comes up behind me, tense at the sun-warmed hands that grip my shoulders, and at thirteen I think I understand the thrill of gambling as he gathers my hair back, gently twisting it into a small black band off my neck. What’s the verdict? he asks, and I see a slot machine behind my eyes, watch the fruit spin spin slow stop. Jackpot. Sweet, today, I tell him. He smiles at me. Takes my hand.

You’re not making a
commercial about it, you’re
commercial about
it, minimizing hate, but
far differently than you claim.

On car trips,
long, short,
everything in between,
mom brings a bag of hard candy
that she can never make last.

A peppermint finds its way
to her mouth
and she crunches down 
almost immediately.
She grabs another one and says
“I’ll make this one last
the next ten miles”
but in the same breath
it’s already gone.

I unwrap one
and it crumbles
under my teeth.
My mom laughs and says
“You got the biting gene.”

As each of us goes for another, she says
“surely this one,”
determined to make it last.

The car races on,
pavement blurring by
as the future takes me 
to my third city in four years.

Another peppermint
disappears down my throat–
jagged pieces of yet another tough pill,
and the sound of bone
grinds on bone as I think
“surely this one.”

Timber
Timbre
Thyme-bre
Thim-bree

English is pugilism
do you see where sounds hit
as psychoacoustic utility
arrives in pantomime of
knowing divine or
being a general
sink in time
to the un-
trained
eye

apophenia
my emergent
zucchini

I run walls
like spider strings and
sling words without anything to bequeath

open bloom
the sweet pink light,
the soft laugh, 
god and the sound. 

My feet hurt from standing.
My mind hurts from grinding.
My belly hurts from eating.
My cheeks hurt from smiling so hard after an amazing weekend.

Night falls; the sun rises.
Last night’s pageant-girl birthday queen
sleeps, white skirt rests on
the floor, a box fan from Mamaw June’s closet
whines like a heated cat.
Exit through the window,
rest on the chipped-paint windowsill,
drop to the ground,
admire the dirty gutters,
the whitewashed backdrop of
a Tupperware-polite, plastic Sunday.
Cast glances along the sidewalk edging,
pause in silence for
a dried-out earthworm.
Go two blocks, a mile past
the blinking light,
over the railroad track, toward
the church.
Walk past the parking lot minivans.
Go inside.
Choose to sit in the back row and
rest.
Sit with the skinny ankles,
the adulterers, the delivery drivers,
the gas man, the tired mother,
her son, his wife, her sister, who teaches folks how
to knit at the old bingo hall turned community center, a stranger, the guy who came out in the 8th grade and runs a supply shop, his sister and her husband and his brother who does drag two towns over because no one in this town wants to understand, two strangers, a liar, a thief, a mother who dresses too young, a father who is dying, three strangers, actors, lawyers, teachers, the pediatrician with small hands and good, good, good people who make sandwiches for all folk, mourn for those who die without families, and remember to place hymnals four to a pew. Go ahead, rest and enjoy the free air conditioning.

Stand up, follow the signs, and find
the toilet.
Notice the cricket resting in
a basket of feminine things.
        A sign?
Yeah…probably…it’s probably about how most
folk sit down to take a rest…eventually…
even crickets.

Mistakes happen, 
you however, are not a mistake.
You were born with a purpose.
even if the one egg and sperm donors,
didn’t plan you.

You never know when you
might be eating them.

Especially when you jump to conclusions. 

mosquito-bit, fat, slung by the old fence—
that is to say, chain-linked between hackberry
& wild cherry, gnarled & reaching, a spent
yet restless sleep yields discourse tangled up
in wintercreeper that grows all night in
dim green fluorescence, flooding the sky like
forest-wrapped meadows, but where the pavement
meets the vines and weeds the glinting stars could blind you.

this sleep ebbs once then breaks before dawn.
chicory-purple cast in its mind’s eye, it puts on
water, brews coffee, cools it with whiskey.
sleep like this can no more last than can the
mulberries in their season caught in a bedsheet
cast over  the dumpster under the tree.